Lead poisoning: a silent epidemic

There’s growing evidence that lead poisoning shaves IQ points in children and has an insidious effect on behaviour. While experts debate safe exposure, a boom in home renovations could increase the risks. The suburbs of Queensland flooded earlier this year are lead-dust hot spots but residents haven’t been warned. Reporter: Ian Townsend (Originally broadcast on the 6 May 2012)

UPDATE: Since this program went to air, there have been further calls to reduce the acceptable blood lead levels for children.

Transcript

Ian Townsend: Oh, my God.

Nigel Gorman: Now, what’s happened here—we’re looking at the front veranda—that is a very heavy lead concentrate, okay? You can tell by the thickness of the paint and it’s going to take a fair bit of grinding to get that back to a really good surface. But certainly where that thicker paint is, that’ll be a big hazard.

Ian Townsend: Have you seen many houses in this condition, though?

Nigel Gorman: Thousands.

Ian Townsend: In this condition?

Nigel Gorman: Yeah, in this condition. Most definitely.

Ian Townsend: Thousands of homes like this one on the outskirts of Brisbane were under water last year. You can still see the mud stains, the gutters are sagging, windows broken, and the green and white paint has bubbled and cracked, dripping flakes of paint onto the ground.

After the floods Nigel Gorman, who specialises in removing lead paint, saw house after house like this one being sanded with angle grinders.

Nigel Gorman: Driving past, watching people grinding off their houses; that’s the scariest part. And not just the homeowners, but also painters.

Ian Townsend: Was there much of that?

Nigel Gorman: Plenty of it, but there has been forever; there will continue to be, I believe, until the government steps in, or workplace health and safety, EPA, all of those sorts of guys, step in and say, ‘Hey, listen, this is a problem. We need to fix it.’

Ian Townsend: The problem is lead poisoning. The public health focus for many years has been on the lead industry towns of Port Pirie, Broken Hill and Mount Isa, but it’s swinging back to the older suburbs of our big cities; suburbs like Ipswich North, near Brisbane, where Cathy Mason’s house flooded to the ceiling last year. She and her husband, Michael Vallance, renovated it themselves, knowing nothing about lead or how it might affect their two young boys, until they were tested.

Cathy Mason: The tests showed that both boys had lead poisoning. My youngest, Jack, his levels are about 22, which is about three times the safe level. Lukah, I think, was about 15, so he wasn’t as high, but the biggest concern was for Jack, because he was so young. He was eight weeks when we flooded, six months when we found out he had lead poisoning. And the risks for children developmentally, you know, with brain damage and all that sort of thing, is very high. The younger you are, the more dangerous it is, so we were very scared.

Ian Townsend: They were scared because they went onto the internet and discovered an avalanche of research from the US showing how damaging lead in tiny amounts can be to children. What were once considered small and safe exposures to lead are being shown to shave off IQ points and change behaviour.

Cathy Mason and Michael Vallance had to talk their doctor into testing their children. They’re still worried about Jack, who’s now 18 months old.

Michael Vallance: Developmentally, we think it has had an effect, but you can’t really… it could be each child’s different. You don’t know if you can…

Cathy Mason: He’s definitely behind…

Michael Vallance: …what Lukah was.

Cathy Mason: …Lukah was, but I mean that could just be him.

Michael Vallance: It could just be a different personality, so we’re not sure if that’s that or not.

Ian Townsend: What are your concerns down the track?

Cathy Mason: Just worried that he’s not going to be the person that he was born to be, so that’s pretty heartbreaking to think that, yeah.

Ian Townsend: It’s hard for parents like Cathy and Michael to know how worried they should be. No one’s disputing the research, but there’s a lot of debate about what it means for individual children like Jack and Lukah.

Mark Taylor: It’s a silent epidemic. The effects are insidious. Often the children don’t present with any clinical signs and problems may not really arise until maybe children start entering school and they’re struggling at school, for example, with their reading and writing abilities.

Ian Townsend: In January, a committee of the US Centers for Disease Control recommended halving the nation’s blood lead action level; the level of lead in the blood that triggers a range of actions, which we’ll describe later. The CDC committee wants it down from 10 micrograms per decilitre to five, and the World Health Organisation is considering that level, too.

When Cathy Mason and Michael Vallance renovated their home, the whole family recorded lead levels over five. Jack, the baby, recorded 22. If Australia follows the US and halves that blood lead standard, tens of thousands of Australians will be over the limit. There’s a debate about how big this problem really is, and even if it’s a problem at all.

The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the NHMRC, has a group looking at this lower level. One of its members, toxicologist Michael Moore, says we’re exposed to less lead today than we have been for decades.

Michael Moore: The magnitude of the lead in fuel problem is probably less than some people imagine, in the same way as the lead in paint problem is probably less than people imagine. The fact is that over the last 30-plus years there’s been a concerted program of de-leading of a whole range of things in our general living environment.

Ian Townsend: Are we de-leading the environment, or are we just reducing the environment’s exposure to lead by not using lead in paint or petrol?

Michael Moore: We’re de-leading the environment in the sense that we’re trying to use less and less lead anthropogenically; that’s from human extraction.

Ian Townsend: But there is still a legacy issue, I understand, as well, with old houses still having the old lead paint, and also dust on roadsides, and in certain suburbs having high lead levels.

Michael Moore: There is a residual legacy problem, which clearly is diminishing with time.

Mark Taylor: I just think that it’s perceived that lead’s gone away, lead’s no longer a problem, and that the lingering legacy of lead in Australian environments, it’s a non-issue. But I think if you look at the research and then you start looking at towns such as Port Pirie, Mt Isa, Broken Hill, and then you look at soil lead studies from Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, etc, you can see from looking at all these studies that that lingering legacy of lead in Australian cities lives on and it hasn’t gone away. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t disappear.

Ian Townsend: One of the reasons the CDC in the US wants lead levels down is that the research shows that children’s brains are being damaged before they reach the point where something’s done about it. In Australia, though, health authorities are yet to be convinced that the problem’s that bad. From South Australia Health, Dr Kevin Buckett:

Kevin Buckett: That’s still quite disputed territory in some areas and we’ve just discussed the fact that the Centers for Disease Control in the USA have evaluated it and determined that they think the evidence is adequate to make this change in policy. We’ve still to wait for the Australian counterparts to do the same. In terms of lead in the general population, it’s not such a big issue now, but there are still point sources, and I think it’s up to public health authorities to be aware that there is still lead in the community and that we should be acting on it when we find it.

Ian Townsend: Outside the town of Port Pirie, no one knows what the lead levels are like, because in South Australia doctors aren’t obliged to report them. Kevin Buckett:

Kevin Buckett: Elsewhere, lead in children is relatively rare; it’s usually associated with home renovation, or battery recycling contamination or something of that order. We do have good networks with GPs and so, while we don’t have a formal notification process, we often do end up working with GPs who have clients and patients who have higher blood lead levels and do investigations and try and reduce ongoing exposure.

Ian Townsend: There’s no way of being able to report, then, how many children in South Australia generally might have had elevated blood lead levels?

Kevin Buckett: No, that’s right, there isn’t.

Ian Townsend: In Queensland, doctors do have to report high lead levels. What those reports show is that the main source of lead poisoning is lead in paint, in places like Brisbane where people renovate, which they did in droves after last year’s floods. It was renovation on a scale so big that one of the world’s experts in children and lead, Dr Bruce Lanphear, says he’d expect to see a range of health problems emerging.

Bruce Lanphear: You probably will start seeing it now, if you started to measure children’s blood, or parents, if they’re doing some of the home renovation themselves. So you’ll see the acute increases in exposure among families who are doing some of this work if they live in the older homes. And in five to six or seven years, if we tracked it carefully, if you tracked it carefully, yes, you could start to see increases in some problems like ADHD if there were sufficient numbers of children exposed. Now, this may seem like causing anxiety, but this is a real threat and it has to be taken seriously.

Ian Townsend: There’s a danger here in alarming people unnecessarily. If the lead paint’s in good condition and buried under layers of other paint, it won’t be exposed and isn’t a problem. A good painter will test for lead, seal each room as they scrape and sand, and take the dust carefully away.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, though, that few people did that; that they weren’t alarmed enough about the risks to take those precautions.

After last year’s floods there were public health warnings about asbestos and contaminated water, but nothing was said about lead. At Ipswich, Cathy Mason says her family wasn’t warned.

Cathy Mason: When we found out, I was actually a bit angry at the government for not warning us. So when it flooded, everyone, the media pushed about be careful of the mud, because the water’s diseased, be careful of the asbestos, because we all know about that, but nothing was said about lead.

Ian Townsend: Background Briefing has for the past six weeks sought an interview with Queensland Health. The department wouldn’t talk to us, but said in a statement:

Reading: ‘Queensland Health’s post-flood focus was on the issue of asbestos debris and contaminated water problems as these were the issues of key public health concern. Information for the public in relation to dealing with lead in paint during home renovation and restoration work was already available and accessible to renovators and contractors.’

Ian Townsend: There’s information on a number of websites, but the public weren’t specifically warned about lead, even though Queensland Health knows it’s also a key public health concern. Ten years ago, Queensland Health reported that home renovation was the single biggest cause of high lead levels in the public, and it emphasised how important it was to publicise those dangers. This is what it said:

Reading: ‘This analysis indicates that the public health focus for elevated blood lead levels should be to make the general public aware of the dangers of lead exposure whilst renovating old homes and the precautions they should take in this circumstance. In particular, measures should be adopted to prevent children from ingesting paint or other lead-based materials whilst renovation is occurring.’

Ian Townsend: On the line from the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver is Bruce Lanphear, who says the world over public health authorities are failing.

Bruce Lanphear: As a whole we have failed, the public health community has failed, physicians have failed to warn families of these problems. And it happens day after day around the United States, around Canada, where people do renovation and they have no reason to believe, because we’re failing to warn them about it. We have tools where we can find out where houses contain lead hazards—whether it’s after renovation, after water damage—but we are failing to use those tools. So I really place the blame largely on the public health community and on physicians.

Ian Townsend: In Ipswich, Cathy Mason and Michael Vallance are rebuilding their 1930s Queenslander, more than a year after the floods.

Michael Vallance: Yeah, we bought the house in September ‘09 for our first house to buy and live in.

Ian Townsend: It’s a nice spot here in Ipswich and you’re just near the river there, aren’t you, and there’s a park.

Michael Vallance: Yeah, we thought it was a very suitable place because we wanted the Queenslander-style house. We thought with the footy fields and the river and the park across the road—it was a very quiet street, off main roads—so, yeah, we thought it would be a nice place for the family.

Cathy Mason: Seemed perfect.

Michael Vallance: Seemed perfect, yeah.

Ian Townsend: But early last year the river rose and flooded the home to the ceiling. They were four weeks into removing the damaged paint when a friend mentioned lead.

Michael Vallance: So we went and got tested and Cathy didn’t have much…

Cathy Mason: We both had slightly elevated levels, but we were under what they regard as the safe…

Michael Vallance: Yeah, safe levels.

Cathy Mason: And because of that they said, you know, ‘You guys are fine, so your kids should probably be fine. Just leave them out of the house and make sure you take the right precautions from now on.’

Ian Townsend: But you were still concerned, obviously?

Cathy Mason: Yeah, just with all that information I’d gotten. And I’d gone and I’d contacted a few experts, because it seemed like the doctors didn’t really know much about it and not many people knew much about it. It was going through my head every day. I was like, well, we don’t know, we don’t know. Even though the doctors had told us, you know, they’re probably fine, I just wanted a piece of paper saying that they are fine. So it was a couple of weeks later that I took them back to the doctor and I said, ‘Look, they’ve said that we probably don’t need a test, but I want to be sure.’ So that’s when we got the kids tested.

Ian Townsend: For a child, a blood test with a big needle can be traumatic, but the lead levels in the parents should have rung alarm bells, because in cases like this the lead levels in children are often much higher than their parents’.

As we heard Jack, who’s now 18 months old, had a blood lead level of 22 micrograms per decilitre, more than twice the current limit and four times the new national standard being considered. Jack’s brother Lukah was three times that new standard. Their parents Cathy and Michael felt responsible.

Michael Vallance: It sort of made you feel like bad parents in a way, because we exposed our kids to something that was potentially very harmful.

Cathy Mason: We know it’s our job to protect them and we sort of failed in that job.

Michael Vallance: Because we were in here doing the paint-stripping, and although the kids weren’t directly with us, like, we sort of kept them outside just because it’s dusty and whatever you’re doing, and Jack was at the age when he couldn’t even crawl around, so he was just in the bassinet out the front with someone taking care of him. Yeah, it really did make us think about what we’ve done.

Cathy Mason: Feeling guilty, scared, all of that.

Ian Townsend: In Queensland, doctors notify Queensland Health if they find a blood lead level over 10 micrograms per decilitre. Queensland Health is then supposed to visit the property, do tests, and offer advice. If a child has a blood lead level over 20, Queensland Health is supposed to recommend that the parents see a paediatrician.

Jack’s reading was 22, but Cathy and Michael said they weren’t advised to see a paediatrician, nor did Queensland Health test the soil around the house as Cathy and Michael expected they would.

Cathy Mason: Did they test the soil?

Michael Vallance: They didn’t test the soil. They said it would be very expensive, I think, if they were to test the whole site. So I don’t think they were too keen on testing it. Because we sort of wanted to know what do we do with the outside, like, the dust has gone on the ground outside, the kids are going to play out there, what’s going to happen now? And it was pretty much our costs that we would have to pay if we were concerned about the site being contaminated. Or either we could just… they said it would probably be cheaper if we could just scrape all the soil off.

Ian Townsend: Did they tell you that you would have to pay for the testing?

Michael Vallance: Yeah, they said that if we were to get it tested completely for our peace of mind we’d have to pay to get testing, which I thought was a bit crazy. Then they said the cheaper option would just be to scrape the whole topsoil off and then put new topsoil down, which…

Cathy Mason: Just to be sure. So rather than pay for the testing, just scrape it, put some topsoil on and then it would be cheaper that way.

Ian Townsend: How do you know it was the paint that caused the lead poisoning?

Cathy Mason: Well, we got a test ourselves from Bunnings, it was from Bunnings, and if it’s red it’s lead: put it on the paint, it was lead. And I guess apart from that we don’t really know.

Ian Townsend: Cathy Mason and Michael Vallance said Queensland Health didn’t give them the results of any testing. So Background Briefing asked environmental scientist Mark Taylor to do some independent testing.

(Sound of Mark Taylor taking samples)

It turns out that the paint on one of the doors to the boys’ bedrooms had a lead concentration of 22,900 parts per million. A concentration of 1000 parts per million is considered high. The ceiling dust and the soil under the front steps also had high lead levels, as did dust samples from two vacuum bags.

More worrying was the dust on a windowsill on the front veranda, which had a lead concentration about ten times what would normally be considered acceptable and enough to re-expose a child if they put their hand in it and then put their finger in their nose or mouth.

Mark Taylor:

Mark Taylor: It’s extremely high in lead dust. The Australian standard is 1000 micrograms per metre squared; the US standard equates to about 440 micrograms per metre squared. So those levels are extremely high. There’s quite a bit of research now which shows the relationship between lead dust and children’s blood lead level is pretty well established. So it’s clear that unfortunately the owners have renovated and inadvertently exposed their children to significant amounts of lead dust.

Ian Townsend: Even without being renovated, most older houses in cities have some level of lead dust from old paint and old petrol emissions.

Mark Taylor: Most houses do seem to have lead dust floating around from one source or another and it is possible, therefore, that that dust may then get tracked back into the house, that sits on the outside veranda or on the steps, gets tracked back into the house and again it may well pose a risk to those children.

Ian Townsend: All around Cathy and Michael’s house in Ipswich, people have been, and still are, renovating. Every house in this street has been scraped and sanded.

Cathy Mason: Actually, everyone in our street is at the moment. Up to that yellow house.

Michael Vallance: Up to the yellow house was pretty much what got flooded, so… and that’s all the people behind us, every house, those two houses, everything behind us.

Ian Townsend: And they’re all old Queenslanders. They all would have had the same paint?

Michael Vallance: Yeah. They’re definitely all old-style houses that definitely with 100 per cent would have had lead paint. And a lot of them have been stripped back on the outside. We haven’t done our outside yet.

Cathy Mason: Because we’ve heard that exterior paint they used more lead in than interior paint. So…

Ian Townsend: Right next door, the owner’s just finished sanding and painting the outside of his house and is building a deck. He was flat out with the work and only had a moment to talk.

Neighbour: Oh, mate, yeah. We’ve been working on a big property at the Gabba for 20 years. I think I taste lead. The nature of the beast, I think. But my kids are grown, so…

Ian Townsend: Professional painters in this area all describe the taste of lead in that paint dust. Lead tastes sweet. It’s believed to be one of the reasons why children will pick up chips of lead paint and eat them. But most people who are doing up old homes for whatever reason know little about lead and its toxic effects. And do-it-yourself home renovating has never been more popular.

(Sound from TV show, The Block)

There are three and a half million homes in Australia painted with paint that contains at least one per cent, and up to 50 per cent, lead.

The dust is disturbed when a wall or ceiling’s knocked down and, in an old house, might contain not just the dust from previous paint jobs, but lead particles from petrol. It wasn’t long ago that the choice at service stations was between Super and Standard, which was really a choice between how much lead you wanted in your petrol.

(Sound of man filling car at petrol station)

In 1976 more than 1000 tonnes of lead came out of car exhausts and spread over Sydney, for example. It seeped into ceilings and fell onto gardens, particularly near busy roads. The natural level of lead in the soil is around 50 milligrams per kilogram. Anything over 300 milligrams is considered dangerous. The soil next to the house at Ipswich was over 700 and it’s even higher in parts of Sydney.

Professor Mark Taylor:

Mark Taylor: I have a PhD student, Mark Laidlaw, who’s study is ongoing now in Sydney. He’s looked at five houses, four in the older west part of Sydney, and we’ve got soil levels there of about 1500 milligrams per kilogram.

Ian Townsend: Is that all from leaded fuel?

Mark Taylor: Well, interestingly, he’s looked at only brick houses for that reason…

Ian Townsend: So they haven’t been painted?

Mark Taylor: No. Only the eaves have been painted. But he’s not sampled under the eaves; he’s sampled in the garden. And we’re still working through the data, but it looks like the soil lead, using lead isotopes, is from leaded gasoline. So you have that problem, then in Balmain you’ve got lots of older houses, wooden houses; they’ve been painted, they’re 100, 120 years old. They’ll have been painted with lead paint, that lead paint weathers and that lead paint forms dust particulates, which is then found later on in the surrounding environment, which then poses a risk.

Ian Townsend: The single biggest source of lead poisoning is home renovation, but it’s the lead industry towns such as Mt Isa, Broken Hill and Port Pirie that make the news because they’re always testing lead levels in children.

Here’s a recent news story about the latest tests in Port Pirie in South Australia:

Journalist (archival): The lead smelting company Nyrstar says it can achieve a target of having 95 per cent of infants and pre-school children in Port Pirie with acceptable blood lead levels by 2015. The latest quarterly figures show 76 per cent of all children tested below the 10 micrograms per decilitre guideline. That’s an improvement of four per cent on the same time last year, although there has been a decline in the number of children tested. The general manager of Nyrstar in Port Pirie, Glenn Poynter, says to achieve the goal, parents must be vigilant in testing their children.

Ian Townsend: The smelter company has spent $50 million reducing the emissions from the smelter and it’s cut the average blood lead level in children from over to 10 micrograms to about five.

(Sound from the smelter)

The smelter’s owned by Nyrstar and its manager is Glenn Poynter:

Glenn Poynter: Yeah, we recognise there’s an issue and we’re doing something about it. We’re not denying it, we’re not ignoring it; in fact, we’re being very active and looking for every opportunity to improve that situation, because we want a sustainable future for this industry and this town, and a sustainable future for this town. I mean we make a significant contribution not just to the town but to the region and also to the state of South Australia.

Ian Townsend: The survival of Port Pirie is linked to the survival of the lead industry, and so while everyone’s well aware of the health issue, it’s a touchy subject in the town.

Smelter manager Glenn Poynter:

Glenn Poynter: People preferred not to talk about it I suppose, is the way to put it.

Ian Townsend: Why do you think that is?

Glenn Poynter: I’d suggest there’s a… one, it’s sort of getting painted with there’s a something-wrong-with-you brush, and I guess people don’t appreciate that. You know, there’s been some negative media about Port Pirie over the years and the people in Port Pirie are very parochial; they’re very proud to live here. It’s a great place to live, it’s a great place to raise your family, and so they get pretty upset when there’s some negative media that suggests that it’s otherwise.

Ian Townsend: It’s proving difficult getting every child’s blood lead level down below the current national target of 10 micrograms per decilitre. A quarter of the children in the town are still over 10, but that’s a vast improvement on what it used to be. A couple of blocks from the smelter lives Dave Aldridge, who arrived in Port Pirie in 1974 when there was more lead dust around.

Dave Aldridge: Dusty, yeah, we didn’t have the stack when I first came here, so all the stuff would come straight across the town virtually.

Ian Townsend: What was that stuff?

Dave Aldridge: All sorts of pollution, I suppose. Often you’d taste sulphur and I suppose there’d be lead dust and all sorts of things.

Ian Townsend: So you worked at the smelter for a while?

Dave Aldridge: Six years in the lead refinery, yep.

Ian Townsend: OK, so you must have been exposed to a fair bit of lead then, Dave?

Dave Aldridge: Yeah, I had levels in the forties.

Ian Townsend: The whole family had high lead levels. Dave Aldridge’s daughter was born in 1990, and at one stage her blood lead level was 73 micrograms per decilitre—seven times the current limit, 14 times the proposed new level.

Dave Aldridge: And she did what we call the basic skills test at Pirie West Primary School and she finished in the bottom grade in every single aspect of that test and she was put in pretty much bottom in the school and she was put in a special class for slow children.

Ian Townsend: Were there a lot of kids in that position?

Dave Aldridge: There was quite a few in the special class she was in. I did have misgivings about her going into that class, but it was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. The teacher there was really terrific.

Ian Townsend: The twist here is that Dave Aldridge’s daughter went on to do really well at school, and is now at university doing a PhD in psychology. Dave Aldridge says if the lead was a problem, he overcame it by coaching her through school.

One of the difficulties with population-wide studies that show, for instance, that lead causes brain damage, is that the effects on individuals can vary widely.

Environmental scientist Mark Taylor:

Mark Taylor: There’s always the anomaly, but all those epidemiological studies, they don’t take the anomalous ones. They look at that bell curve and they say, look at the bell curve, look at the relationship, what we can see is there is a spread of people of exposures, but what do those exposures mean in terms of their educational outcomes, their health outcomes? And they all show the same thing: that there’s a negative impact.

Ian Townsend: That’s why the Centers for Disease Control in the US and now the World Health Organisation want blood levels down as fast as possible. In Port Pirie, it’s been hard to get them all below 10; to get them all under five would almost be impossible without drastic action, such as closing the smelter.

Keeping the lead dust down in Port Pirie is a never-ending job. Even on a Saturday morning, someone’s vacuuming the Port Pirie West schoolyard. There’s a big campaign in the town to use wet mops daily, close windows on windy days, get young kids to wash their hands all the time and not put their fingers or toys inside their mouths. Families have outside toys that are never brought inside. The parks are also watered down or covered with mulch to keep the dust down.

In one park, a family is having a barbecue.

(Sound from barbecue)

They are recently arrived from the Philippines, working for a local engineering firm. They’re telling me that their eight-month-old baby girl has a blood lead level of 11 micrograms per decilitre. They’ve been told to try to stop the baby putting her hands in her mouth to get her lead levels down.

Father: We’ve changed the normal habit of the baby that’s putting their hands in the mouth, the toys.

Ian Townsend: But you don’t know whether it’s come down yet since?

Father: After three months we’re going to test again.

Ian Townsend: Last October, a panel of scientists on the US National Toxicology Program said there was ‘sufficient evidence’ that lead levels even under five micrograms per decilitre had adverse health effects in children and adults.

One of those scientists was Bruce Lanphear in Vancouver, who started looking at lead effects on IQ more than a decade ago.

Bruce Lanphear: We could take into account mother’s IQ, and race or ethnicity, and tobacco exposure, and all these other factors, and we still saw striking decrements at the lowest levels of exposures. Now, by this time I’m starting to say, ‘Boy, it looks like this could be real.’ But this was still only the second study that really had tested this carefully. But within a few years, a series of other studies were done, including a pooled analysis that included children from Port Pirie Australia, and we confirmed what we’d seen before, and that is striking decrements in IQ at the lowest levels and still ongoing decrements at higher levels, but not quite as steep.

Ian Townsend: Lead is a neurotoxin and it damages the frontal cortex of the brain, which regulates decision-making and behaviour. It can also damage other parts of the body and there are links on the Background Briefing website to the many effects of lead.

Years ago, when there was lead in toys, tin cans, and paint, much higher blood lead levels produced symptoms like numbness in the arms and legs, cramps, hallucinations, brain swelling and even death. That’s rare now.

We heard earlier that baby Jack at Ipswich, in Queensland, had a level of 22. That’s high, even by Port Pirie standards, but it’s not high enough to make him physically ill. If Jack’s parents hadn’t been told about lead, it wouldn’t have occurred to them that he’d been poisoned.

Bruce Lanphear says most cases of lead poisoning show no immediate symptoms.

Bruce Lanphear: What we’re seeing now for the majority of kids is subclinical. But as the kids age, now what we’re beginning to recognise is that low levels of exposure to lead are associated with the development of ADHD, conduct disorder, and even criminal behaviour, even at levels that just a few years ago we thought of as innocuous or safe.

Ian Townsend: In Australia, the world’s largest exporter of lead, there’s been very little research. Lead’s taken much more seriously in the US, where the National Toxicology Program cited 22,500 peer reviewed studies when it recently recommended halving blood lead levels. Some of the research includes links between lead and crime rates, and how much money the country would save if it could get lead levels down. There’s been nothing like that in Australia.

At Macquarie University in Sydney, Mark Taylor says we don’t know if there are similar issues here.

Mark Taylor: Ian; no data, no problem.

Ian Townsend: But if we apply US data to Australia, we can see where the problems might be. If you take the spread of lead exposure in the US as a guide, it suggests at least 100,000 children are at risk here in Australia.

Bruce Lanphear says even at that that new level of five micrograms per decilitre, some damage is going to be done.

Bruce Lanphear: When you look at this, it’s almost like we’ve made a deal. We want to maintain the economy and therefore, yes, there’s some sacrifice that we have to accept. Now, this isn’t of course limited to lead. It’s true for air pollution, it’s true for mercury. We’ve all come to accept some level of harm. But I don’t think most of us recognise the full extent of that harm, and I don’t think most of us think about the sacrifices we’re making on our children’s behalf, on our children’s health. We don’t think about it on a day-to-day basis, because I don’t think we can. It’s too uncomfortable.

Ian Townsend: The Australian average blood lead level is said to be less than two micrograms per decilitre, but no one really knows. That figure’s also based on blood lead levels in the US, where there’s a regular national survey, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, that’s identified a big problem with lead in paint and dust in US cities. Australia’s only similar national lead study was 15 years ago, and it estimated that 75,000 children aged under five had lead levels over 10 microgram per decilitre back then. That survey was supposed to be followed up, but never was.

Elizabeth O’Brien is president of the LEAD Group, a charity set up to eliminate lead poisoning.

Elizabeth O’Brien: I was on the committee where we designed the study and there was absolutely a commitment from the health department to have a follow-up study following the elimination of leaded petrol, because it’s the only way to tell whether you’ve done enough. And when they did do follow-up studies after the elimination of leaded petrol in the US, they discovered that they had to do a whole new set of programs on eliminating lead in paint and eliminating lead paint hazards from housing.

Ian Townsend: In the US, no one can touch lead paint without a licence. Only last week the US Environmental Protection Agency fined a man $10,000 for sanding down lead paint with a power tool and without a licence. The penalties are harsh because the health risks are known to be high.

Twenty years ago the NHMRC called for urgent action to make the public aware of the dangers of lead, after evidence back then showed how low lead levels damaged children’s brains. The NHMRC has again formed a group to look at lead. It’s brief is to make sure doctors around the country are made aware of the risks.

At Ipswich Cathy Mason and Michael Vallance now know about those risks, but they had to do the research themselves.

Cathy Mason: You go to a doctor, you trust the advice the doctor’s going to give you, and they were saying, ‘Oh well, you know, it’s not that bad, it’s not that common, it’s…’

Michael Vallance: ‘Unlikely.’ And we’re sort of thinking these are the professionals who know about this sort of stuff and then we do our own research and we have to just make our own decision on what we’re going to do, because the information we were getting from different doctors was all over the place.

Ian Townsend: The information is showing that a child’s lead exposure can change the course of their life. All parents try hard to give children like Jack the best start in life, and that means avoiding a substance as toxic as lead.

Cathy Mason.

Cathy Mason: If he’s been affected, if his brain’s been affected, then his life could be affected and that’s, you know, that’s pretty heartbreaking to think that.